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Appointment Scheduling for a Health Care Facility with Series Patients

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  • Siyun Yu
  • Vidyadhar G. Kulkarni
  • Vinayak Deshpande

Abstract

This study focuses on determining the appointment scheduling for healthcare facilities with series patients. “Series” patients are patients who are scheduled for a series of appointments instead of a single appointment. Examples of healthcare services with series patients include radiotherapy/chemotherapy for cancer, physical therapy, kidney dialysis, diabetes treatment, etc. The aim of this study is to design appointment scheduling policies taking into account revenues per service per patient, costs of staffing, overtime, overbooking and delay. The appointment scheduling problem is formulated using an MDP model. However, due to the huge state space, computing the optimal policy is impractical. Hence, we propose the Index Policy (IP) based on a one‐step policy improvement algorithm applied to the MDP model. We study a further simplification obtained by approximating the distribution of the number of patient visits by a Geometric distribution. A key analytical contribution is to prove the MDP to be a uni‐chain, which implies that there exists an optimal policy that maximizes the long‐run average profit. We also find that the IP provides a significant improvement over the other policies. Especially with the Geometric approximation, the IP requires minimal effort in implementing, and works almost as well. To test the effectiveness of our proposed IP in a real‐world setting, we use the data from a local physical therapy center to compare its performance with two other commonly used policies, namely, the Next Available Day Policy and the Shortest Queue Policy. We recommend the IP with Geometric approximation for series patients’ scheduling, which is computationally efficient and can significantly increases profits by incorporating the series feature of the patients’ appointments. Finally, we provide analysis that incorporates several practical considerations such as accounting for patient heterogeneity in number of visits and inter‐visit times, the option to reject new patients when the system is at full capacity, and incorporating patients with known number of visits at the time of the scheduling decision.

Suggested Citation

  • Siyun Yu & Vidyadhar G. Kulkarni & Vinayak Deshpande, 2020. "Appointment Scheduling for a Health Care Facility with Series Patients," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 29(2), pages 388-409, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:popmgt:v:29:y:2020:i:2:p:388-409
    DOI: 10.1111/poms.13117
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Agnihothri, Saligrama & Cappanera, Paola & Nonato, Maddalena & Visintin, Filippo, 2024. "Appointment scheduling in surgery pre-admission testing clinics," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 123(C).
    3. Bozkir, Cem D.C. & Ozmemis, Cagri & Kurbanzade, Ali Kaan & Balcik, Burcu & Gunes, Evrim D. & Tuglular, Serhan, 2023. "Capacity planning for effective cohorting of hemodialysis patients during the coronavirus pandemic: A case study," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 304(1), pages 276-291.
    4. Adam Diamant, 2021. "Dynamic multistage scheduling for patient-centered care plans," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 24(4), pages 827-844, December.
    5. Martin Bichler & Soeren Merting, 2021. "Randomized Scheduling Mechanisms: Assigning Course Seats in a Fair and Efficient Way," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 30(10), pages 3540-3559, October.
    6. Minglong Zhou & Melvyn Sim & Shao‐Wei Lam, 2022. "Advance admission scheduling via resource satisficing," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 31(11), pages 4002-4020, November.
    7. Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh & Pooyan Kazemian & Mohammad Fattahi & Mark P. Van Oyen, 2022. "Coordinated and Priority‐Based Surgical Care: An Integrated Distributionally Robust Stochastic Optimization Approach," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 31(4), pages 1510-1535, April.
    8. Reihaneh, Mohammad & Ansari, Sina & Farhadi, Farbod, 2023. "Patient appointment scheduling at hemodialysis centers: An exact branch and price approach," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 309(1), pages 35-52.

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